Transmission

From Holding Yawulyu, by Zohl dé Ishtar:

"Teaching by direct instruction was only attempted when an elder determined that I was to learn specific religious and ritual skills and knowledge. Wirrimanu's 'number one' Song Woman, the Napanangka who had entered my dream years earlier, made it her business to teach me songs. She would sit in front of me for hours singing and urging me on. Consistently ignoring my frustrated requests for her to purrkarriwa (become slow) so that I could hear the words, she would instead beat out the rhythm on my leg, insisting that I already knew the song because it was inside me. I finally began to realise that I could sing the song when I allowed myself to feel it. Singing is not a mental task, but an embodied event. The words matter, but the power of the song is held in the rhythm, the sense of the word within the music. To feel a song is a primordial, preconceptual experience which overrides the mind's separation of the senses and creates instead a synaesthesia, a fusion of the senses.

"Opening to song brings a connection with the Tjukurrpa [Ancestors]. It was no mere coincidence that this direct teaching of cultural knowledge was most often done in relationship with the land, and often in a ceremonial context. While painting up our bodies in the Tjilimi, at the women's wilytja (bough-shed) on the Turlkupuru (Communal Law Ground), or on location at sites in the bush, the elders would sing while they painted the younger women. One learnt the meaning of the song by imbuing it through the skin, through the body. The song was contained in the painted designs. One listened with the body."